Yam Tianku

» see blog.yam.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Taiwan ran a full blog decade on its own hosts, in its own language, and none of that traffic ever came near a Turkish connection. Yam Tianku is a name I met in translation, well after the files were gone.

The service began on 20 March 2005, when yam and Roodo signed a cooperation agreement and launched a joint product called yam Blog. yam itself was much older, one of the first Taiwanese web directories, the sort of portal that locally predates the search engines. In September 2006, after yam merged with Webs-tv, Roodo left the partnership and the blogs were moved onto the new owner's systems under the name yam 天空部落, the sky tribe. What you got for free was a blog with video upload and photo albums that carried no stated storage limit.

The decline is the usual one for the format. Facebook took the audience and Instagram took the photographs, and by the middle of the 2010s the Taiwanese blog hosts were a maintenance cost attached to brands that had moved on. yam stopped its old authentication process on 6 July 2018. On 7 August it announced a major adjustment to how it operated, which meant the blogs were closing.

The dates it published were hard ones. Editing stopped on 17 September 2018, leaving the whole site readable but frozen, and at noon on 1 October everything not already retained was deleted. There was no export tool when the announcement went out. The instruction to users amounted to saving their own pages by hand, one file at a time.

~ the case file ~

~ what the neighbors did ~

Taiwan had been through this before, and recently. Yahoo Kimo's blog service and Wretch both closed in December 2013, and both closed with help attached: an export tool, and a partner host to move the files to. Five years later yam published a deletion date first and only said on 15 August that backup and migration were being planned.

The useful tool ended up coming from a competitor. Pixnet, a rival Taiwanese blog host, built a migration path for people stranded by the announcement. It is a strange thing to have to thank a competitor for.

~ what unlimited meant ~

The photo albums were the reason many of these accounts existed at all. No stated limit meant people treated the service as storage rather than as publishing, and individual accounts ran to twenty thousand images and past it. That is a decade of a family's pictures sitting on a free tier with no contract behind it.

Unlimited is a promise about space and never about time. The larger an account had grown, the worse those six weeks between the announcement and the delete date got, because the people with the most to lose were the ones with the most files to click through by hand.

~ the long tail ~

yam.com is still there, running as a news portal. The blogs are not, and neither is any real archive of them, because a deletion at the host is not something a crawler can undo after the fact. What survives is whatever individual pages the Internet Archive happened to reach before October 2018.

A Taiwanese blog post from 2007 is now about as recoverable as a Turkish forum post from the same year. Both of them depended on one company continuing to feel like paying for the disk.

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